It has become very popular recently to do guided and individual journeys with psychedelics, such as psylocibin mushrooms, ayahuasca, ketamine, or MDMA for emotional healing and spiritual growth. There are even universities now in the US and elsewhere that are conducting research in this area. We have both personally experimented with these substances in the past and occasionally lately, and we also have many clients who are telling us that they have benefitted greatly from them.
We felt it was time to share our own understanding and experiences.
Several studies show that in combination with therapy these substances can help treat deep depression, addictions, PTSD and even eating disorders. They open up new pathways in the brain that can facilitate learning and finding new ways of living. Particularly the weeks just after a deep experience is a very important time to implement new ways of living to break unhealthy patterns.
The laws are slowly changing in several places around the world as the therapeutic effects are being officially recognized.
We can get amazing insights from these substances. They can help us gain perspective from the endless shame attacks that we may be suffering from that can cause depression. With proper preparation, clear intention and guidance, they can support us to feel and heal the pain of our childhood wounds. They can help us penetrate and get some distance from our irrational and trauma-based fears and panic. They can support us to break addictions. They can help us connect with our essence and even bring us deeply in touch with Source or God (or whatever word fits for us) and overcome fears of death by experiencing that death is a fiction. These are powerful and life changing insights, sometimes deeply psychological and even painful and sometimes transcendent and expansive.
Many years ago, I (Krish) had profound experiences experimenting with mushrooms and LSD and I can even credit them with inspiring me to go to India and meet Osho. Once, while on a mushroom trip, someone handed me the book, “Be Here Now” by Ram Das. As I read this book, I felt that he was talking to me. At that time, I was lost and searching for meaning and direction. I had just dropped out of medical school much to the horror of my parents and was living in a commune in Berkley, California. The combination of the mushroom journey and the wisdom from that book give me a path to follow. It would not be for some years later that I would go to India and meet my spiritual master, Osho, but I felt that I knew then, that meditation and spirituality was what really mattered to me in life.
Another time, while visiting the Grand Canyon, I was on LSD and sometime during that experience, I swear I heard a voice talking to me (I am not so esoteric). The voice said, “Ok, you have gotten all you can get from substances, now you need to find a master.” These substances put me in touch with an ecstatic and expanded state of consciousness and when I met Osho and looked into his eyes, I knew for certain that he was “there”. He was living what I had experienced on those journeys.
In the eighties as a young woman, I (Amana) was in a lot of pain from deep inner disconnection. I didn’t know it consciously at the time, but I had hardened from the traumas I had experienced, and was not in touch with inner joy and connection. I was on a road to severe self destruction, when I encountered MDMA. I had experimented with other drugs; cocaine, LSD, mushrooms, but it was not until the profound experience with MDMA that something opened and I started to feel for the first time in many many years. Everything changed from that moment on. It literally was as if my life changed from black and white to color. Up until that point I didn’t feel anything.
As the substance helped the deeper opening I knew that meditation was the next step and that the drug had done what it could. At that time unfortunately I saw many friends getting addicted and not being able to use the substance to support them for deeper growth. At a certain point I knew it was the end of the journey for me and that it had supported me as much as was possible and I stopped any substance for more than 30 years. In recent years I have experimented a few times with psylocibin again. It has been interesting to explore again from a new perspective.
Just before writing this article I remembered that a few years before the first experience with MDMA, as a teenager I had an interesting experience with LSD. It was on a beach in Ibiza with some friends. I was smoking cigarettes at the time, and during the LSD trip as I reached for a cigarette I saw the poison and what it was doing in my body. From that day on I couldn’t smoke anymore.
I find it interesting that now people have discovered that using these substances can help treat addictions. Now it is done mostly in safe guided settings, which is very different than I used to do it in the 80’s.
However, in our experience, this topic of using plant medicines is complex and complicated because not everyone has positive experiences. And this is one of the reasons we wanted to write this article.
Some people have even been damaged by them, and in some cases, people are using them to avoid connecting with deeper emotional issues and with their fears and pain.
The work that is being done now with substances is much more sophisticated and responsible than it was back in the day. And many of our clients say that they feel that doing journeys together with seminars and sessions has made a huge difference is gaining perspective from their fears and shame.
Unfortunately some of our clients did not have such beneficial results. One client shared about a trip to Peru where she spent ten days doing ayahuasca under the guidance of a shaman. The experience didn’t help her with her fears and eating disorder and even made her more fearful. Another was so shaken by the journey that years later, she still suffers from painful flashbacks. As a whole, it made her more fearful, fragmented, less grounded and less trusting of life. These substances can shatter our defenses quite radically and bring us directly in touch with the fears that our defenses have shielded us against. If we are not sufficiently prepared and grounded or if we are in a highly activated and fragile place and not ready to face our fears in such a dramatic way, it can be very overwhelming. In addition the setting is extremely important, to be guided and supported by someone we trust.
We have also noticed that some people have become addicted to doing journeys. Rather than integrating these experiences in their daily life, they struggle with facing and embracing their wounds, and have little tolerance for being triggered and being with their own or another person’s fear or shame.
These medicines can have the effect of making us attached to expanded states of consciousness and less accepting of wounded states. In addition our nervous system can be affected for a while afterwards and it can be unsettling to be with if we don’t have tools for self-regulation. It is important to know that days afterwards we are more vulnerable and the body needs time to relax, settle and integrate.
A client recently shared that she had an experience of a guided ketamin journey with a therapist where there was very little preparation beforehand and no integration afterwards. It was very unsettling for him and didn’t seem to have had any meaningful impact on his life.
In short, these substances can be extremely helpful for helping us find more self-love, trust in life and others, put us directly in touch with God consciousness and less absorbed with our minds. It can give us distance from our wounded states, see the ego as an illusion of being separate, and help us deal with our fears, especially fears of death.
But they can also fragment us if we are not ready to face ourselves without our customary, habitual, and unconscious defenses. And finally, they can be another form of distraction from facing our pain and fears in a healthy, sustained, and truly healing way.
And finally, unless integrated into our daily life, they might become a distraction from our growth process. Growth and transformation come not from accumulating experiences but from how whatever we are doing to grow shows itself in our daily life.
We focus on five areas of our life :
- the emotional maturity of our intimate relating including the relationship to ourselves,
- the respect and love we are giving to our body and health,
- the level of our life energy,
- the way that we are developing our creativity and contribution,
- and whether we are finding meaning in our life.
In our experience, whatever path we take for our emotional and spiritual growth, it needs to include three vital aspects :
- healing our wounds of shame, fear, and abandonment,
- developing reliability and confidence in our inner space (the capacity to be with uncomfortable feelings and connect with our wisdom),
- and recognizing that our being is separate from our ego identity.
Regardless of the choice to experiment with plant medicines or substances our focus and interest is always to keep the focus on growth and nourishing the inner connectedness.
If you do decide to embark on the exploration of plant medicines the most important factor to consider is the environment; the people around you, your intention and the integration afterwards.
And finally, whatever glimpses you may have while under the influence of a substance is just that…a glimpse….It can be a very important glimpse that can show you something you didn’t even know existed….and it may be able to show you the way….but ultimately it’s up to you to discover that light within you. …even if at first without the substance it may seem very dark…until you find your own light.
The danger can be that you get addicted to the light of the substance the same way that you may become addicted to the light of another person or a master. It’s up to all of us to discover the light within. And that light and that experience is so much sweeter and gentler and more ecstatic than any substance.